How is Telemedicine impacting patients and providers? As a fast-growing field in the healthcare sect
How is Telemedicine impacting patients and providers? As a fast-growing field in the healthcare sector, telemedicine shows a lot of promise in solving various difficulties that health professionals and patients are facing today. Supplying a range of advantages for both patients and medical providers, it offers:
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Pros of Telemedicine
Adopting the latest telemedicine initiatives can help your practice achieve numerous benefits.
- More Convenient and Accessible Patient Care
According to a recent Cisco global survey, 74% of patients prefer easy access to healthcare services over in-person interactions with providers.
- Healthcare Cost Savings
Remote analysis and monitoring services and electronic data storage significantly reduce healthcare costs, saving money for you, your patients, and insurance companies.
- Extended Specialist and Referring Physician Access
With telehealth, patients in rural or remote areas benefit from quicker and more convenient access to specialists. These patients go through longer appointment travels and have trouble accessing lifesaving consultations for specific illnesses or chronic care plans.
- Increased Patient Engagement
When patients are committed to improve their healthcare goals, it aims to lower costs and better healthcare service.
- Better Patient Care Quality
Telemedicine offers ways to improve patient-centered approaches. This is critical to patient care quality. Patients can address healthcare issues quickly with real-time care consultations and learn about treatment alternatives quickly. A new study shows that telemedicine patients score lower for depression, anxiety, and stress, and have 38% fewer hospital admissions.
Cons of Telemedicine
While telemedicine shows no limit to its growth over the upcoming decades or so and has clear benefits, it still poses some technical and practical difficulties in the health sector.
- Technical Training and Equipment
Restructuring IT staff responsibilities and purchasing equipment cost demanding. Training is crucial to building an effective telemedicine system. Physicians, specialists and other medical staff require training on the new systems to ensure a solid ROI. On top of that, your staffing requirements may decrease.
- Reduced Care Continuity
Keeping up with patients’ records and visits will be difficult due to patients using telemedicine services from a variety of medical specialist. This makes it hard for specialists to provide health services as maintaining patients’ details is the primary core for any health institution.
- Fewer In-Person Consultations
Keeping in touch and regular patient visits to the clinic is a common activity in health institutions. This is a recent development in the industry and it will take time to adjust. Although telemedicine is a good alternative and the way to go.
- Tricky Policies and Reimbursement Rules
Laws and policies always tend to take lots of time to be implemented. Such as the healthcare laws and rules may lag and take time to come into place. Hence this delays technological advancements in the health sector as technology continuously evolves very fast as compared to the implementation of the relevant policies.
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